Happy New Years, Tubers! We hope you all had a restful and joyous holiday. 2005 went out with bang for us as our traffic has continued to soar to record numbers. However, as many of you noticed, the performance of our video upload process has been a bit lackluster the past few weeks. Recently, we've had users reporting video upload times anywhere from a few hours to a few days. First and foremost, we sincerely apologize for the degradation in service you may have experienced and any inconvenience it may have caused you. Bradley, our sys admin, explains in a bit more detail the issues we're encountering, what caused them and what we're doing about it:

Issue: Slow video uploads

Cause: Most consumer internet connections upload much slower than they download. So, uploading a 100 megabyte video via a DSL or cable modem will require a lot of time, upwards of multiple hours.

Resolution: We ask that for your patience when uploading large files. However, we are working on improving the upload page by adding a status tracker to let you know that the upload is still in progress.

Issue: Upload processing time. Some users are experiencing long waits during the "Processing" phase, after a video upload is complete.

Cause: Due to the extreme growth we've had recently (thanks!), we've started to run short on the servers required to perform this intensive task.

Resolution: Fortunately, we have plenty of machines on the way and expect this to be remedied shortly.

Issue: Video pausing. During peak hours users may occasionally notice that new or popular videos are slow to download, causing a pausing effect.

Cause: YouTube is currently serving over 45 terabytes of video per day. This is equal to 75,000 dial-up modems running at full speed for an entire day.

Resolution: To keep up with this demand and future growth, we're constantly working on ways to improve our internet connectivity. We expect some of our most recent additions to come online over the next few days and weeks.

So, while we're all extremely excited and thankful for the tremendous viral growth we've been experiencing, we've got a lot more bills to pay these days (including one for the kitchen sink we're finally getting - no more washing our coffee mugs in the bathroom!). Since YouTube's inception, one of the things we've been passionate, if not fanatical about, is that our service must always remain free to our users - no strings attached. In order to be able to keep this mantra, and not have to pass on a dime of costs to our users, we've started implementing some advertising on the site to help pay for our operating expenses (as well as that kitchen sink). Our goal is to not disrupt the video viewing experience in any way - and hopefully - if we do this right, we might even be able to enhance your experience.

Our mission at YouTube is simple, to provide our users with the best online video service imaginable, for free. Little things may change here and there on the site to continue to make that possible, but ultimately, the goal itself will never change.